The$Seventh$Northern$ Englishes$Workshop$ The$seventh$in$a$series$of$ biennial$workshops$on$the$ dialects$of$Northern$England$ ABSTRACTS$BOOKLET$ $ [in$order$of$presentation]$ $ 14th$−$15th$April$2016$ $ University$of$Edinburgh$ Unstressed vowel backing in Manchester English Maciej Baranowski (University of Manchester), Danielle Turton (Newcastle University) This study is the first systematic exploration of the sociolinguistics of the lowering and backing of the HAPPY (the final vowel in city, chilly, etc.) and LETTER (the final vowel in Manchester, father, etc.) vowels in Manchester English, which form part of the stereotype of the city’s accent. It is based on a sample of 123 speakers stratified by age, gender, socio-economic status, and ethnicity, recorded in sociolinguistic interviews, supplemented with formal elicitations. Formant measurements of the informants’ complete vowel systems are obtained in Praat (Boersma & Weenink 2015) – by hand for 25 speakers and in FAVE (Rosenfelder et al. 2014) for 98 speakers (12,653 tokens of HAPPY and 7,537 tokens of LETTER) – and are analysed in a series of mixed- effects linear regressions, with social (age, gender, ethnicity, social class, style) and internal factors (preceding and following sound) entered as independent variables, and speaker and word as random effects. The retraction of both vowels shows a pattern of monotonic social stratification, with lower classes showing more backing and lowering; interestingly, women show more backing of HAPPY than men. Ethnicity is also significant, with Pakistani speakers not participating in the retraction. While HAPPY lowering and backing is a stable variable, influenced by the quality of the preceding and following sounds (Turton & Ramsammy 2012), the backing of LETTER turns out to be a change in progress, led by younger speakers. We also explore the question of a possible structural connection between the shifts of the two vowels in Manchester. References Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. 2015. Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Rosenfelder, I., Fruehwald, J. Evanini, K. and Jiahong, Y. 2011. FAVE (Forced Alignment and Vowel Extraction) Program Suite. http://fave.ling.upenn.edu Turton, D. and Ramsammy, M. 2012. /i,!/-lowering in Manchest[ʌ]: Contextual patterns of gradient variabilit[ε]. Paper given at the 20th Manchester Phonology Meeting, Manchester, 24–26 May 2012. Perceptions of Chesterfield and Chesterfield English Claire Ashmore (Sheffield Hallam) Chesterfield, north east Derbyshire, is a border town which is considered by many locals to be “not quite the north and not quite midlands.” As a result, many Chesterfield natives feel torn between a northern and midlander regional identity. This ambivalence will be explored in the paper, along with its impact on the Chesterfield dialect. Chesterfield is a market town only 12 miles from Sheffield, South Yorkshire, and ten minutes away by train. While close to the border with Yorkshire, it officially belongs to the East Midlands region which, together with the West Midlands, has been referred to as a “no-man’s land” within the UK (Wales 2000: 7-8). Chesterfield’s county town is Derby, 28 miles further south. However, Chesterfield’s close proximity to Sheffield, along with Sheffield’s greater “cultural prominence” (Montgomery 2012), suggests that Chesterfield English should be levelling with Sheffield English. Yet, Braber’s (2014) study indicates that the midlander identity is strong amongst Chesterfield teens, hinting that there may be resistance to linguistic features perceived to be either typically Sheffield, Yorkshire or northern by Chesterfield natives. This paper will outline results of perceptual activities with three age groups of Chesterfield locals to explore how, and indeed whether, Chesterfield locals perceive local dialects, including their own, and whether attitudes towards Sheffield affect the linguistic features they adopt or eschew. References Braber, N. 2014. The Concept of Identity in the East Midlands of England: Investigating Feelings of Identity in East Midlands’ Adolescents. English Today 118, 30 (2); 3-10. Montgomery, C. 2012. The Effect of Proximity in Perceptual Dialectology. Journal of Sociolinguistics. 16 (5); 638-668. Wales, K. 2000. North and South: An English linguistic divide? English Today 61. 16 (1); 4-15. 2 Inverted priming effects when perceiving ‘Scouse’ Marten Juskan (University of Freiburg) Listeners’ perceptions of linguistic variables can be influenced by providing social information about the speaker (Niedzielski 1999, Hay et al. 2006, Hay and Drager 2010). Within exemplar theory (cf. Pierrehumbert 2006) these results are explained by stored, phonetically detailed, exemplar clouds, which are also indexed with gender, nationality, etc. of the speaker. Activating a concept cognitively foregrounds matching exemplars and makes perception of new input as belonging to that category more likely. This paper reports the results of an experiment that played recordings of Manchester English to subjects, half of which were told that they were listening to a Liverpudlian. Scouse was chosen as the priming category because this variety is widely known and highly stigmatised in the UK (cf. Montgomery 2007, Trudgill 1999), and provides a range of variables found to be socially salient in different contexts (cf. Honeybone and Watson 2013, Watson and Clark 2013). All priming effects were in the unexpected direction: listeners were less likely to perceive Liverpool variants when they were expecting a Scouser. Hay and Drager (2010) link up inverted effects with dissociation, but a more convincing explanation for my data (and theirs?) is found in Herr’s (1986) “moderate” and “extreme” primes. My results suggest that effects such as those reported by Niedzielski might only be achievable when the varieties concerned are phonetically similar (and the prime is thus ‘moderate’). ‘Liverpool’, on the other hand, seems to be an ‘extreme’ prime in the context of other northern Englishes, and therefore creates an inverted effect. References Hay, J., Nolan, A. and Drager, K. 2006. From fush to feesh: Exemplar priming in speech perception. The Linguistic Review 23: 351-379. Hay, J. and Drager, K. 2010. Stuffed toys and speech perception. Linguistics 48: 865–892. Herr, P. M. 1986. Consequences of priming: judgment and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51 (6): 1106-1115. Honeybone, P. and Watson, K. 2013. Salience and the sociolinguistics of Scouse spelling: exploring the phonology of the contemporary humorous localised dialect literature of Liverpool. English World-Wide 34(3): 305-340. Montgomery, C. 2007. Northern English Dialects: A Perceptual Approach. PhD dissertation, University of Sheffield. Niedzielski, N. 1999. The effect of social information on the perception of sociolinguistic variables. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 18: 62-85. Pierrehumbert, J. 2006. The next toolkit. Journal of Phonetics 34: 516-530. Trudgill, P. 1999. The Dialects of England. Oxford: Blackwell. Watson, K. and Clark, L. 2013. How salient is the NURSE~SQUARE merger? English Language and Linguistics 17: 297-323. Origins of PRICE Nucleus Raising in Liverpool English Amanda Cardoso (University of York) PRICE nucleus raising has been attested in a variety of English dialects across the world, usually when new!dialect formation has also occurred (Trudgill 2004). These nucleus raising processes in different varieties are independent innovations. A range of different approaches have been proposed to account for these observations. The present paper examines three of these approaches – failure! to!lower, asymmetric assimilation, and new!dialect formation – through a recently described instance of PRICE nucleus raising in Liverpool English (Knowles 1973, Cardoso 2015). The current investigation analyses the PRICE vowel in the Origins of Liverpool English Corpus (Watson & Clark forthcoming), a dataset with speakers born shortly after new!dialect formation in Liverpool, and a recent corpus (Cardoso 2015). Using these datasets, it is possible to explore the origins and development of PRICE nucleus raising in Liverpool English. I examine the precursors to nucleus raising in this variety through a dynamic approach to acoustic analysis of diphthongs, 3 such as multiple measurements along the trajectory and Euclidean distance from the nucleus to offglide. The current findings suggest that nucleus raising in Liverpool English likely did not occur as a result of new!dialect formation or failure!to!lower. On the other hand, evidence from the oldest speakers in the dataset supports asymmetric assimilation as a starting point for nucleus raising. These results suggest that a dynamic acoustic analysis and a diverse speaker sample may help to further our understanding of how and why nucleus raising occurs. References Cardoso, A. 2015. Dialectology, Phonology, Diachrony: Liverpool English Realisations of PRICE and MOUTH. PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh. Knowles, G. 1973. Scouse: the spoken dialect of Liverpool. PhD thesis, Leeds University. Trudgill, P. 2004. New!Dialect Formation: The Inevitability of Colonial Englishes. Edinburgh University Press. Watson, K. and Clark, L. Forthcoming. OLIVE: The Origins of Liverpool English. In Hickey, R., editor, Listening to the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Velar nasal plus in the north of (ing)land George Bailey (University of Manchester) Despite the breadth of work investigating (ing) across the English-speaking world